WARNING - VIRUS ALERT !!!!!

(I've also heard from another member about this.)

Recently, I have received a couple of e-mails with attachments concealing a variation on the WIN32 virus.
Luckily, my anti-virus software is quick and powerful enough to prevent any damage.

Both e-mails had something in the subject line, words which were light-related, so interesting to a CPF member.

Just a note to beware of this nasty stuff.

lightlover

I was getting about 50 of these a day as recently as a week ago; now it's gone down to 5-10 a day. All the messages are between 100 and 150K long, and all contain only a sender & subject line with an empty body and no attachment shown. But if you do a "View Source" in Netscape, the body of the message hides a rather large bug that supposedly runs automatically if the message ends up in your inbox in Outlook or Euodora. I wrote a filter for Netscape that looks for a long string of "AAAAAAAAAAAAA" or something in the executable's header that automatially sends them to the garbage can before they can reach my inbox.

(Edit) If you make a filter, have it search for "TVqQAAMAAAAEAAAA//8AAL" in the message body, and set it to delete. This intercepts the bug before it can end up in your Inbox.
Then just empty your e-mail garbage can now & then.

When setting rules for mail I noticed an option to "delete from server". Does this keep you from even dowloading it?

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Tree:
When setting rules for mail I noticed an option to "delete from server". Does this keep you from even dowloading it?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

"Delete from server" only offers the option of leaving it on the server after downloading. Not selecting it would leave your messages on your server, and would contribute to whatever storage limits might be imposed by your mail provider.

The best insurance against any "web bugs" or self executing scripts is to turn off html. It's turned off on mine, but on any mail I chose I can click on the message icon permitting me to view it in html. There are some mail readers (but not many), that views html in a viewer other than your default web browser. You can recognize if that's the case on yours by the missing graphics in the mail that were suppose to be fetched from somewhere on the net. You'd be surprised how much information is exchanged when you read html mail. Spammers and market researchers love it.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Tree:
When setting rules for mail I noticed an option to "delete from server". Does this keep you from even dowloading it?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Normally, this deletes the mail from your server *after* you receive it. If you set this option to "no", you would eventually no longer to be able to receive mail at all because there would be 10MB worth of message sitting on your server (usually the same as you ISP). Anybody who wrote you subsequent to that would get their message bounced back to them, with the error "User's mailbox is full".

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by *something ridiculous ?:
(Luckily, my anti-virus software is quick and powerful enough to prevent any damage.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Which one do you use?

BN

It's a form of "Norton Anti-Virus", which my extremely computerate friend has tuned-up and optimised. It doesn't get in the way at all, but protects fiercely.

I'm told that the standard version of Norton is pretty good in itself, and quite inexpensive.

lightlover

Norton "Internet Security" is good. I've used it for 2 years. It's caught that Klez Worm virus numerous times. Course, after your first year, you do have to pay to keep getting the online updates.